Debat seputar keotentikan klan Ba’alawi sebagai keturunan Nabi Muhammad saw. masih, dan terus bergulir. Isu ini telah membelah sikap umat Islam, khususnya di Indonesia, menjadi dua poros: yang setuju menganggapnya otentik dan yang menolak otentisitasnya.
Not only the grassroots community, religious leaders are no less enthusiastic about this issue. Yes, this issue is important because it is ‘about’ religious leaders. Although Islam doctrinally in a number of verses and hadiths does not differentiate between people based on their hereditary background, the Prophet as a central figure in the example of Muslims is not excessive if his descendants get a special place in the hearts of Muslims. And some of the Prophet's “descendants” in Indonesia, incidentally, act as religious leaders.
After all, there is no explicit prohibition in Islam for anyone to claim to be descended from the Prophet or anyone else. But making that claim assertively, let alone discrediting religious figures outside their community to get special previllage, has in fact caused friction in the community.
Recently, a study specifically aimed at refuting the claim of the Prophet's grandson emerged. By its opponents, the study was immediately perceived as demeaning, not only to religious people from among the “grandchildren of the Prophet” but also from among the descendants of the Walisongo who historically have genealogical links with the Ba'alawi clan.
The core argument of the study, regardless of its scientific level and value, is based on the allegation of what G. H. A. Juynboll calls “diving” (name smuggling), or tadlis in hadith science terms. The question is, how easy is it to smuggle a name into a genealogy in the midst of the strong tradition of isnad and genealogy that has become the special domain of Arab-Islam?
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Looking back, it has been well known since the Jahiliyyah that the Arabs had a strong oral tradition. This is usually true in societies where literacy is not very popular. In fact, before Islam came, only a few could read and write. Even the standard rules for writing in Arabic came much later with the need to write down the Qur'ān for codification and ease of reading.
But on the other hand, Arab civilization is a civilization of texts. Compared to other nations, there is nothing the Arabs are proud of more than the texts they composed in strings of beautiful poetry. Reading biographies of the Jahiliyyah in biographical lists such as al-Isbahani's al-Agani (d. 356 AH) for example, we find that almost every Jahiliyyah person was a poet. Therefore, recognizing a person's poetry became an easy way to identify people who had similar names. Poetry was then memorized and passed down through the generations.
Not only memorizing poetry, Arabs used to memorize the names of their ancestors. At least seven names and above. Also, the Arabs“ pride in beautiful horses led them to pass down the names of the horses” ancestors. Ibn al-Kalbi's (d. 206 AH) Nasab al-Khail Fi al-Jahiliyah wa al-Islam wa Akhbaruha ("The Names of Horses in the Period of Jahilyah and Islam and Their Stories") and similar works are good examples to illustrate their intimacy with the past, as well as to mark the development of the discipline of genealogy.
Parallel to the spread of poetry and the development of genealogy, the tradition of tribute to in the transmission of news became a common phenomenon that we also recognize in hadith narration, qira'at variants, and also tariqah sanads. It is not unusual to find that in the classics, in almost all branches of Islamic scholarship, sanad sequences often fill the pages of the book, their length exceeding the content of the news being conveyed.
In conveying information, complete with its chain of transmission, each teacher took pride in doing so orally. It wasn't that they didn't have books, but books were kept under the table. The function of books, according to Gregor Schoeler, is nothing more than a mnemonic aid.
So, when did books as a medium of preservation and transmission begin to be used in the Islamic world? There is not much information that is absolutely certain about this. What we do have are a number of traditions that prohibit the Companions of the Prophet from writing anything other than the Qur'an. This is an indication, as Schoeler believes, that the tradition of writing has existed since the early days of Islam.
The oldest book that has reached philologists is the hadith book al-Muwatha’, the collection of Imam Malik (d. 174 AH). If no hadith book older than al-Muwatha’ is found, it means that the process of transmission of hadith continued through the generations of the Companions, the tabi'in and the tabi’-tabi'in orally for more than a century and a half until Imam Malik wrote his hadith book.
Shahifahs (sheets) do exist. Some Companions and some Tabi'ins are known to have had shahifahs. But before al-Muwatha’, the function of writing remained limited to preservation and not transmission. That is to say that a large number of traditions reached us through oral transmission rather than written transmission.
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Whether one agrees or disagrees with Kyai Imaduddin Kresek's rebuttals and arguments about the Ba'alawi clan's lineage to the Prophet Muhammad, what is clear is that he has succeeded in bringing this age-old issue to the altar of debate, which has attracted a lot of attention. Various alternative tests can and have been conducted. These include DNA testing, philological studies, history, phenomenology and so on.
Hypothetically speaking, if Kyai Imad's rebuttal were true, then how easily this genealogical system could be breached. This is also the case with hadith. The multiplicity of interests has made the hadith not always safe from forgery, thus prompting strict sorting and verification (tahqiq wa taustiq) among hadith scholars.
Furthermore, if the rebuttal is based on a positivistic argument over the absence of contemporaneous documents confirming (itsbat) the genealogy of the clan in question, then should we also be suspicious of the authenticity of the hadith, tafsir, and various narrative materials that reach us? Seeking these is more fundamental to religion than “that”, isn't it?!
Wallahu a'lamu bish-shawab [ ]
Dr. Lalu Tarjiman, M.A
(Lecturer of Arabic Language and Literature at FUDA, UIN SMH Banten)
